Her Warrior for Eternity Read Online Free Page B

importantly, could he read her thoughts about him?
    He shrugged, still smiling, which wasn’t reassuring. “You live at the UCL hall on Gower Street, right?”
    She wasn’t really surprised. “Yes. Do you know how to get there?”
    “I’ve had three centuries to roam London. I know it better than the cab drivers.”
    She couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the idea that he had lived so long. Were all two-natureds long-living? Was Toby older than he looked? It had never occurred to her to ask.
    “I’m not very familiar with London. I’m from Bedford.”
    “Me too! Whereabouts there?”
    Baffled by the coincidence, she answered him, even though the sensible part of her insisted on holding her tongue. “Goldington.”
    “Ah. It was fields and pasture back in my days. We had a small farm south of the river. Sheep.”
    His words conjured a charming image of pastoral idyll. “Is it still there?”
    “No. Our last human relative sold it in the late nineteenth century and moved to America. They’ve built a road over it.”
    So much for that idyll. “I’m sorry.”
    “That’s okay. It was a ramshackle place by then.”
    She tried to imagine what life had been like in his youth, but she had only a vague notion that people were malnourished and small. “You’ve grown big.”
    He laughed. “It’s the vampire gene. Makes us larger. You should see some of the vampire-born.”
    “What does that mean?”
    He looked surprised, as if he had expected her to know. “Someone with two vampire parents, and most likely a long line of vampires in their ancestry too. I’m human-born. Both my parents were humans.”
    “So how come you’re a vampire?” They were almost at her home, and as much as she had wanted to flee earlier, she wanted to continue the conversation now.
    “The two-natured gene is recessive. Humans can carry it, but unless the child has the gene from both of them, it won’t do anything. Apparently both of mine had it and they passed it on to me and my brother. The leader of our organisation recognised it and made me and my brother vampires.”
    “I didn’t know humans could be made vampires.” She had never given it a thought, actually.
    “We all start as humans.”
    She stared at him, amazed at the notion. He glanced at her and grinned. “Eye-opener, eh?”
    “You can say that again.”
    They were at her hall. The street was empty and dark, the streetlamps switched off already. Jeremy pulled the car over on the no parking zone in front of the main entrance and cut the engine. “I’ll see you in.” He didn’t add ‘to erase her memory’, but that’s what he meant.
    Her stomach fell and she was slightly nauseous as she got out of the car. She didn’t want to have her memory of him taken from her. As scared as she had been of him, she now found him utterly fascinating. With stiff legs, she walked up the steps to the front door of the Edwardian brown brick. Her fingers shook a little as she put the key to a lock.
    “Imagine, before I ran into that … man, I thought the worst thing to happen to me tonight was losing my job.” She was stalling, but she didn’t want the night to end just yet.
    “You lost your job? Why?”
    She smiled, mirthlessly. “I poured a bucket of ice on a customer at the club where I was waitressing.”
    He laughed. “Why did you do that?”
    “He was creepy.” Then a memory dawned. “In fact, he felt like the guy you killed.”
    He stilled, instantly alert. “Where was it?”
    “At the Nightingale Club.”
    “I have to go.”
    He turned around and was in his car before she had made it through the front door. She watched, baffled, how he drove away, too fast, speaking to his mobile. She must have said something important. That, or he didn’t want to have anything to do with her all of a sudden.
    The thought made her sad.
    She climbed to her room and collapsed on the bed. She stared at the ceiling for a long time, trying to commit him and everything he had